The Finance Director engagement for a Rutland owner-managed business — £1,250 + VAT a month. For the company where land, lettings, events and retail all land in one set of accounts, and nobody can say which earns its keep.
Book a 30-minute initial review →England's smallest historic county covers about 147 square miles and had 41,443 residents in 2024. Two towns and no third: Oakham with Barleythorpe at around 13,500 people, Uppingham at around 4,700. With no large urban employment base, people work for themselves — self-employment runs at about 14.8% of residents against 9.5% nationally. The sizeable employers are few and specific: Ketton cement works, the independent schools, HM Prison Stocken, the county council. Everything else is small, owner-run and attached to land, visitors or schools.
Here the person setting the prices is the one driving the telehandler at seven and locking the gate at nine. The finance function is one part-time bookkeeper: purchase ledger, sales invoices, bank reconciliation, VAT return. What is missing is not diligence. Nobody is employed to ask whether the camping field carries the arable, and a two-day bookkeeper cannot be expected to.
Agriculture is still the county's main industry, and the council is reviewing its rural diversification policy because so many holdings have added something: a barn on short stays, storage in a redundant building, a cafe, a venue. Accommodation and food services is now one of Rutland's two largest employment sectors at 14.1%, level with education. One company may run three of them while the books carry a single sales code, overheads in one block, and own produce moved from field to kitchen unpriced.
Segmental reporting fixes that, and it is unglamorous: an activity code on every transaction, an apportionment basis for each shared cost you could defend out loud to a bank, internal transfers priced consistently, depreciation charged where the asset is used. Then a figure appears that did not exist before — contribution by activity. Uncomfortable, and the first number worth having.
Rutland Water, the largest reservoir in the United Kingdom by surface area and managed by Anglian Water, draws well over 1.2 million visits a year, and the county's visitor economy was measured at £135.6m in 2018. Bookings concentrate into school holidays and good weather, harvest receipts land in lumps, and trade in both towns follows the boarding school calendar — while payroll, rent, finance agreements and insurance run flat across twelve months. A comfortable year-end profit can sit on a company that was tight in February and will be again. So the cash view is built on the real season, with the management accounts underneath it.
The decisions that matter here are large and infrequent: convert the second barn, buy the grain store, put in the solar array, replace a machine early because this month's finance deal looks good. Six-figure commitments made on a supplier's figures and a lender's quote. The job is to appraise one properly while it can still change: incremental cash rather than accounting profit, the covenant effect, which activity bears the cost, realistic occupancy rather than the brochure figure.
Senior work, done personally, on your existing Xero or Sage.
Each activity reported separately each month, with its own revenue, direct costs and contribution. Which part carries the others stops being opinion.
Shared costs split on a stated basis — acreage, floor area, headcount — written down once, applied consistently.
A rolling weekly cash view shaped around bookings, harvest and term dates, deposits shown where they fall.
Significant spend modelled on incremental cash, with funding structure and sensitivities, before anything is signed.
For small and micro-entity companies, from ledgers kept to one standard all year — a pack a lender can work from first time.
Where nine in ten businesses have fewer than ten employees, this tier is the wrong purchase more often than the right one. If there is one trading activity and the complaint is late books, it buys judgement you have no use for. Buy the processing instead.
The ladder below is published and fixed. Essentials, £95 + VAT a month: bookkeeping and VAT returns. Essentials + Books, £195 + VAT a month: adds year-end accounts and the CT600. Managed, £395 + VAT a month: adds monthly management accounts with commentary, which is where most owner-managed Rutland businesses should start. Overdue years are caught up at £450 + VAT per year.
It earns its fee when three things are true at once: three or more activities worth reporting separately, a capital decision or lender conversation inside twelve months, and someone already doing the processing. If only one is, you will be told on the first call.
Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA. Twenty-five years in finance, almost all of it inside operating businesses rather than in practice: Head of Finance at a pharmaceutical wholesaler through growth from £3m to £10m, at a publishing and media group of around £13m with an ecommerce arm, and at a £15m software company running cash and treasury through a restructuring.
Splitting one set of accounts into activities judged separately is work done on the inside, where getting it wrong shows up at the next board meeting. Nothing is delegated to a junior. The practice is in Northamptonshire, next door — no Oakham office and no pretence of one.
An hour listing what the company does and how each part earns. Each gets a definition, an apportionment basis and a value for internal transfers.
The ledger is rebuilt around those activities and last year restated through it, so month one arrives with a comparative.
Activity contribution, the seasonal cash view, half an hour on the phone. Fixed fee, Direct Debit, agreed in writing first.
Not guess at it — name it, from the figures. Seven questions you can answer from memory, and an honest verdict on whether your numbers can tell you.
Run the free Quick Books Check → Or book a 30-minute initial review